Above, a beautiful pin-up style cover painted by Jef de Wulf for Tania et le démon by Yvan Nikitine, published by Brussels based Éditions Aphrodite. This is a collection of romantic verse from the Russian poet Yvan Nikitine, not to be confused with the famous 19th century Russian poet Ivan Nikitine, nor the 17th century Russian painter and author Ivan Nikitin. We had trouble figuring all this out, because apparently Nikitine/Nikitin is like Johnson or Jones in Russia, but we think our Nikitine wrote eighteen volumes of poetry over the years, was made a knight of L'Ordre des Palmes Académiques, and is alive and retired in Agen, France. Maybe we should just just focus on the art. Nice, yeah? 1959 copyright.

Above, a cover for Un Cinzano pour l'ange noir, aka A Cinzano for the Black Angel, written by Frédéric Dard in 1953 for Éditions de la Pensée Moderne's collection Les confessions de l'ange noir. The series comprised four books, with this one being the last. Plotwise, the Black Angel gets involved with an heiress who is intent on robbing her industrialist father's vault, which is presumably filled with riches. He does actually get hit over the head with a bottle of Cinzano, which makes for a hell of a hangover. You may not know Frédéric Dard, but he was one of France's most successful authors, publishing more than 300 novels and selling 250 million copies. 173 of those books starred his signature creation Detective Superintendent Antoine San-Antonio. The above novel is not considered one of his best, but when you write books faster than Taco Bell churns out crunchy cheese core burritos there will be a few duds. The cover art is by the always reliable Jef de Wulf.

The hitchhiker has been a central element of many a mid-century thriller, with the results of these rides ranging from hot sex to bloody murder, and several outcomes between. Above you see a cover for Jean Holbrook's Girl on the Run, and below is a collection of more paperback covers depicting various characters casting their fates to the road. Wish them luck—they’ll need it. And thanks to all the original uploaders on these.

There’s no safe place in pulp—especially not the bathtub. Above and below is a collection of vintage covers featuring various unfortunates who chose the wrong time to be naked and defenseless. Well, most of them are naked. A few have clothes on for reasons we cannot discern. Art is by Willard Downes, Barye Phillips, Robert Bonfils, Jef de Wulf, and others. See another good example here.

Above is a great piece of Jef de Wulf art of an amorous sailor and an interested woman for Jacques Marlène’s Faut que tu y passes, cheri!. The book appeared in 1952 from Lutécia Editions à Lyon as part of their Pour lire la nuit collection. We gather the novel was censored in France in 1955. The title Faut que tu y passes, cheri! translates to something like “You have to pass it, darling.” Here again we have a French phrase that doesn’t quite translate into English. Usually we get e-mailed about these, but our e-mailer is down, and we’re well aware of it. We’ll get to fixing that soonish, along with the pulp uploader. In the meantime, you can still contact us at editor@pulpinternational.com if you care to explain this title more fully.

Update: So we got several reponses to this question.

From the blog oncle-archibald.blogspot.comwe learned that the title translates roughly to, "I will have my wicked way with you, darling!" This is in reference to the French expression "passer a la casserole," which has a sexual interpretation and translates, "to have his wicked way with you."

From our friend Jo B. we get a similar interpretation. He says it's a way of saying, "You’ve got to make love with me, you’ve got no way to escape this... (faut que tu y passes). He explains further: In French, they also say, “Il faut que tu passes à la casserole,” which means, "You’ve got to go in the saucepan." Strange, ain’t it ? Sometimes, we also say that for people who want to get a job (at the television, for example or in a company).

So there you go. We're giving serious thought to learning this language. There are thousands of French speakers around here anyway, and it would come in handy.Oncle Archibald has lots of similar book covers, by the way, and we recommend clicking over there for a look.

What’s in a name? Everything, if it’s the title of a vintage paperback.

Above and below you will find a large collection of pulp, post-pulp, and sleaze paperback fronts that have as their titles a character’s first name. There are hundreds of examples of these but we stopped at thirty-two. The collection really highlights, more than others we’ve put together, how rarely vintage paperback art focuses on male characters. The prose is virtually all male-centered and male-driven, of course, but because the mid-century paperback market was male-driven too, that meant putting women on the covers to attract the male eye. We tell our girlfriends this all the time, but they still think we just don’t bother looking for male-oriented vintage art. But we do. For this collection we found two novels that have male characters’ names as their titles, and we looked pretty hard. If we had to guess, we’d say less than 5% of all pulp art is male-oriented. In any case, the illustrations come from the usual suspects—Barye Phillips, Robert McGinnis, Jef de Wulf, Paul Rader, et al., plus less recognized artists like Doug Weaver. Thanks to all the original uploaders for these.

Jef de Wulf really outdid himself here. This cover is from 1958 for René Roques’ romance novel La Fille de Monseigneur, and we think this is by far the best we’ve seen from de Wulf. The central balloon reads “love,” of course, and all the others have the two syllables making up the French word “rire,” or laugh, creating an image of heartlifting joy. Sublime stuff. Check out some of de Wulf’s other covers by clicking his keywords directly below.

Finally, after a lifetime's work—the condiment that will revolutionize how the world eats greenery.

Above, Drôle de salade written by Al Caussin, aka Alex Caussin de Perceval, Percy Wall, and Allan Blyth, published 1952 by France's Éditions de la Flamme d’Or, with awesome cover art from Jef de Wulf. Drôle de salade actually means “funny salad,” so you have to wonder what this book is about. In any case, what a bummer it’ll be for the main character when he finds out the term “French dressing” is already in use.

Moving away from the hard-boiled for a moment, here’s a beautiful cover for Nina Antony’s L’hôtel des chimères, aka Hotel of Chimeras, 1960, from Editions de L’Arabesque’s collection Colorama. As you probably know by now, Antony was a pseudonym, because that’s just what French authors did. This time the owner is an author named Jeannine Rubia who also wrote under Cora del Rio and possibly other names. Another version of L’hôtel des chimères appeared with different cover art, but this breezy effort from Jef de Wulf is sublime.

United States Marines invade Nicaragua to support the U.S.-backed government installed there after José Santos Zelaya had resigned three years earlier. American troops remain for eleven years.

1936—Last Public Execution in U.S.

Rainey Bethea, who had been convicted of rape and murder, is hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky in what is the last public execution performed in the United States.

1995—Mickey Mantle Dies

New York Yankees outfielder Mickey Mantle dies of complications from cancer, after receiving a liver transplant. He was one of the greatest baseball players ever, but he was also an alcoholic and played drunk, hungover, and unprepared. He once said about himself, "Sometimes I think if I had the same body and the same natural ability and someone else's brain, who knows how good a player I might have been."

1943—Philadelphia Experiment Allegedly Takes Place

The U.S. government is believed by some to have attempted to create a cloak of invisibility around the Navy ship USS Eldridge. The top secret event is known as the Philadelphia Experiment and, according to believers, ultimately leads to the accidental teleportation of an entire vessel.

1953—Soviets Detonate Deliverable Nuke

The Soviet Union detonates a nuclear weapon codenamed Reaktivnyi Dvigatel Stalina, aka Stalin's Jet Engine. In the U.S. the bomb is codenamed Joe 4. It is a small yield fission bomb rather than a multi-stage fusion weapon, but it makes up for its relative weakness by being fully deployable, meaning it can be dropped from a bomber.

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